How has the anti-graft war shaped two generations?
January 15 this year marks the 58th anniversary of the January 15, 1966, coup that changed the rules of political engagement and everything else in our country. To use a popular phrase, the young majors struck for the love of the fatherland. Their leader, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, said they were motivated by their patriotic duty as officers to save the country from the “…political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand ten per cent; those that seek to keep the country divided permanently so that they can remain in office as ministers or VIPs at least, the tribalists, the nepotists, those that make the country look big for nothing before international circles….”
The main enemies of their revolution were those who demanded “ten per cent.” The press dubbed them ten per centers. They were those in governments who awarded government contracts and allegedly creamed ten per cent off the contract sum for themselves. This constituted what we later learnt was something called corruption – a long English word that speaks of attitudinal greed, abuse of public office and moral depravity. Most Nigerians knew little about corruption at the time.
Nzeogwu did not have the chance to personally wage the war against the enemies of their revolution but still, the war against corruption, also known as cankerworm, had begun. The ten per centers became the enemies of every government since 1966. All our leaders since then knew the political advantages of promising to wage war against corruption. Waging the war against the ten per centers became socially attractive and politically expedient. An ambitious military politician waved his commitment to the anti-corruption war in our faces to mask his ambition and clothe it in the attractive gowns of an anticorruption warrior. No war in human history has had more generals and more foot soldiers than the anti-graft war in our country. And none has had our mixed bag of records in prosecuting the war.
Because of the ten per centers, military and civilian governments fell. Because of the ten per centers, the mighty fell and took their place among common criminals in our cluttered prisons – for a limited time, of course. The majors set the stage for what has turned out to be the longest running war in our country. It has been a hard war; it has been a frustrating war; and it is a war in which corruption has given as much as it has taken.
On January 12, 1970, General Yakubu Gowon triumphantly emerged from crushing the Biafran secession. As he promised, he had done his duty to the fatherland to keep it united as one nation. He set his sights on the country he intended leave behind in 1976. He set himself a nine-point programme he would accomplish to renew our nation. The eradication of corruption was the number three item on that programme. But when his government fell, his successors probed his military governors and found that ten of the twelve, to use an Agila expression, had palm oil on their hands. Perhaps, that probe, warts, and all, was the first indication that corruption was not the weakness of agbada but that of khaki too.
The war has lasted for 58 years as of this month. For 58 years, this nation has pre-occupied itself with legal and administrative means to get rid of one word: corruption. Transparency International,theinternationalcorruption watchdog, numbers our country among the leading corrupt nations in the world every year. Corruption is the bane of every development effort in the land. It is the reason we take one step forward and take two or three backwards. Corruption takes the blame, and rightly so, for all our failures as a nation. Corruption is the reason our richly endowed country remains tethered to its potential greatness. It crawls where other nations walk and walks where other nations run. Never in the history of mankind has one word defined a nation and held it hostage as corruption has done to our country.
Nearly two generations of Nigerians have lived and/or are living through the anti-corruption war. All of us have known little and heard little beyond corruption and the war cries against it by successive military and civilian administrations. President Obasanjo established our corruption watchdog, EFCC, in 2003 with the statutory duty to prosecute the anti-corruption war. But the commission is called upon to deal with what has lost its teeth: shame. It may name former public officers accused of corruption, but it cannot shame them. Shame has become anachronistic in our land.
A good name does not matter to families anymore; wealth matters much more than a good name. Our public officers are not ten per centers too because corruption has moved from per centages to naked looting of the treasuries at national and sub-national levels. Former state governors are happy to be called upon by the commission to respond to petitions alleging corrupt practices against them. They treat the invitations with levity and as mere routines in the game of politics. Much smoke, not much fire.
President Buhari promised to kill corruption before it killed Nigeria. It was a promise he could not keep. One thing has not happened since the war began. The nation has not won it. Our news media are daily saturated with unbelievable stories of corruption in government. In 58 years of the anti-corruption war, corruption has grown more, not less. All of us wear the badge of dishonour as corrupt men and women because we are Nigerians. The rest of the world thumbs its nose at us at international airports. Something must have gone wrong with the long war to clean up our nation and perhaps make it an island of probity in the murky waters where the likes of Bangladesh blissfully swim.
All wars, small, medium, or major, leave their marks wherever they are waged and against whatever they are waged. Some wars are won and some peter out with the effluvium of time. But all of them shape or reshape societies in ways big and small. It cannot be different with the anticorruption war in our country. The anticorruption war has had a long hold on our nation for 58 years. It must have shaped and reshaped our nation in ways none of us, let alone the young majors, could have imagined. (To be concluded)